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Democratizing British Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Helen McCarthy
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 358 - 387
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2010

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References

1 Birn, Donald S., The League of Nations Union, 1918–1945 (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar The Union was the result of the merger between two wartime bodies, the League of Nations Society and the League of Free Nations Association. For a history of these predecessor bodies, see Egerton, George W., Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978)Google Scholar; and Robbins, Keith, The Abolition of War: The “Peace Movement” in Britain, 1914–1919 (Cardiff, 1976)Google Scholar.

2 Livingstone, Adelaide, The Peace Ballot: The Official History (London, 1935), 6.Google Scholar The membership figure refers only to paid-up subscriptions. In total, over 1 million people belonged to the Union for at least one year between 1918 and 1933, and the number of affiliated societies peaked in 1932 at a little over 3,600. See the LNU's monthly journal Headway 15, no. 4, suppl. (April 1933): i; and Year Book 1933 (London, 1934), 121.

3 Livingstone, The Peace Ballot, 5, 19.

4 Angell, Norman, “Democratic Leadership and the Collective System,” Headway 17, no. 10 (October 1935): 183Google Scholar. Stannage's analysis of discussion inside the government during the run-up to the election offers support for this verdict. See Stannage, Tom, Baldwin Thwarts the Opposition: The British General Election of 1935 (London, 1980), 124–25.Google Scholar Stannage finds that 90 percent of National government candidates, 90 percent of Labour candidates, and 93 percent of Liberal candidates mentioned the League of Nations during their election addresses (app. 4, 291).

5 Amery, L. S., My Political Life, 3 vols. (London, 1955), 3:159Google Scholar; Templewood, Viscount, Nine Troubled Years (London, 1954), 128Google Scholar; Eden, Anthony, Facing the Dictators (London, 1962), 237.Google ScholarCarr, E. H., “Public Opinion as a Safeguard of Peace,” International Affairs 15, no. 6 (November–December 1936): 846–62Google Scholar, and The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1939; repr., Basingstoke, 2001)Google Scholar.

6 For a contrasting view, see Churchill, Winston, The Second World War, vol. 1, The Gathering Storm, 6 vols. (London, 1948), 132–33Google Scholar, in which the author asserts that question 5 on the Ballot “affirmed a positive and courageous policy which could at this time have been followed with an overwhelming measure of national support.” The Churchillian reading was supported by Dalton, Hugh, The Fateful Years (London, 1957), 65Google Scholar; Taylor, A. J. P., English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), 379Google Scholar, and Origins of the Second World War (London, 1963), 121Google Scholar; Younger, Kenneth, “Public Opinion and British Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 40, no. 1 (January 1964): 25Google Scholar. For more equivocal readings of the Ballot, see, e.g., Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan, The Long Weekend (London, 1940), 320Google Scholar; Reynolds, P. A., British Foreign Policy in the Inter-War Years (London, 1954), 112Google Scholar; Mowat, Charles Loch, Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1955), 541–42Google Scholar; Blythe, Ronald, The Age of Illusion (London, 1963), 251Google Scholar; Taylor, Telford, Munich: The Price of Peace (New York, 1980), 226.Google Scholar

7 Ceadel, Martin, “The First British Referendum: The Peace Ballot, 1934–5,” English Historical Review 95, no. 377 (October 1980): 810–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Birn, League of Nations Union, 152.

9 Ibid., 148–49; and Ceadel, “The First British Referendum.” The party-political dimension also forms the focus in Thompson, J. A., “The Peace Ballot and the Public,” Albion 13, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 380–92Google Scholar, and “The ‘Peace Ballot’ and the ‘Rainbow’ Controversy,” Journal of British Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 150–70.Google Scholar Thompson explores the organization of the Ballot in Wales in “The Peace Ballot of 1935: The Welsh Campaign,” Welsh History Review 11, no. 4 (December 1983): 388–99.Google Scholar

10 Taylor, A. J. P., The Troublemakers (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Swartz, Marvin, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar.

11 Sluga, Glenda, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke, 2006)Google Scholar; Mandler, Peter, The English National Character (London, 2006)Google Scholar, 144–45, 178–79, 182–83.

12 The Fourth Reform Act (1918) increased the electorate from 7.7 million to 21.3 million, which included 8.5 million women aged thirty or over. The equalization of the voting age in 1928 added another 7.2 million voters. Butler, David and Butler, Gareth, British Political Facts (Basingstoke, 2000)Google Scholar.

13 Harris, Jose, “Nationality, Rights and Virtue: Some Approaches to Citizenship in Great Britain,” in Lineages of European Citizenship: Rights, Belonging and Participation in Eleven Nation-States, ed. Bellamy, Richard, Castiglione, Dario, and Santoro, Emilio (Basingstoke, 2004), 73–91Google Scholar; Lawrence, Jon, “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalisation in Post–First World War Britain,” Journal of Modern History 75, no. 3 (September 2003): 557–89Google Scholar, and “The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War,” Past and Present, no. 190 (February 2006): 185–216; and McCarthy, Helen, “Parties, Voluntary Societies and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain,” Historical Journal 50, no. 4 (December 2007): 891–912.Google Scholar

14 Apathy and nonvoting were a perennial concern of the political left in this period and became the object of ethnographic research in the later 1930s as carried out by the newly established Mass Observation. See Beers, Laura, “Education or Manipulation? Labour, Democracy, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 129–52Google Scholar; Moran, and Joe, “Mass-Observation, Market Research, and the Birth of the Focus Group, 1937–1997,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 4 (October 2008): 827–51.Google Scholar For historical accounts emphasizing the apathy of the mass electorate after 1918, see Jefferys, Kevin, Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918 (London, 2007)Google Scholar; Fielding, Steven, Thompson, Peter, and Tiratsoo, Nick, England Arise! The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar.

15 For a classic account of the tradition of “dissent” over foreign policy making, see A. J. P. Taylor, Troublemakers. For radical critiques of the Boer War, see Koss, Stephen, ed., The Pro-Boers: The Anatomy of an Antiwar Movement (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

16 For some exemplary statements of the radical position, see UDC, The Morrow of the War (London, 1915)Google Scholar; and Ponsonby, Arthur, Democracy and Diplomacy: A Plea for Popular Control of Foreign Policy (London, 1915)Google Scholar.

17 Seton-Watson, R. W., Wilson, J. Dover, Zimmern, Alfred E., and Greenwood, Arthur, The War and Democracy (London, 1914), 3.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 4.

19 The Council for the Study of International Relations: Its Aims, Methods and Organisation (London, n.d.), 2.

20 Ibid., 2. See also How to Study the Problems of the War (London, n.d); The Study of International Relations (undated leaflet); and How to Form a Study Circle (London, 1916)Google Scholar.

21 For the influence of both British and American progressives on Wilson's thinking, see Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 1986), 370–73Google Scholar; Knock, Thomas J., To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar; and Thompson, John A., Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

22 Article 18 of the Covenant insisted on the registration and publication of all international treaties entered into by member states. Pressmen were admitted into the galleries at Assembly meetings and had access to the comprehensive reports and the minutes of the League's various sessions through the well-resourced Information Section. See Eppstein, John, Ten Years’ Life of the League of Nations: A History of the Origins of the League and of Its Development from AD 1919 to 1929 (London, 1929)Google Scholar; Potter, Pitman, “League Publicity: Cause or Effect of League Failure?” Public Opinion Quarterly 2 (July 1938): 399–412.Google Scholar

23 For wartime discussions about international government, Robbins, see, Abolition, 49–51Google Scholar; Clarke, Peter, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar; Birn, League of Nations Union.

24 Cecil wrote a memo on the subject of international government in November 1916 and pushed for the appointment of a committee (chaired by Lord Philimore) to consider the question, which reported in March 1918. Cecil shortly resigned from the Cabinet over Welsh disestablishment but attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as advisor on League issues to the British delegation. See Egerton, Great Britain.

25 Lord Robert Cecil, 1 August 1918, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 109, col. 735.

26 Cecil to Stanley Baldwin, 31 March 1926, British Library, London (BL): Papers of Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Add. MSS 51080, fol. 172.

27 Bentley, Michael, “Liberal Politics and the Grey Conspiracy of 1921,” Historical Journal 20, no. 2 (June 1977): 461–78Google Scholar; Morgan, Kenneth O., Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; Cowling, Maurice, The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar. See also Cecil's exchange of correspondence with the Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey, in 1933 on the subject of publicity: Hankey to Cecil, 27 October 1933, fols. 97–98; Cecil to Hankey, 28 October 1933, fols. 99–100; Hankey to Cecil, 31 October 1933, fols. 101–4; and Cecil to Hankey, 3 November 1933, fols. 105–7, in BL, Add. MSS 51088.

28 There were around forty of these by the end of the 1920s, carrying out programs of political education, lobbying ministers and officials, and corresponding with each other through the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, an umbrella body based in Brussels (Birn, League of Nations Union, 13–14, 79).

29 Editorial, Headway 18, no. 1 (January 1930): i.

30 White, Freda, “Fact and Fancy,” Headway 17, no. 6 (June 1935): 106.Google Scholar

31 LNU, Annual Report for 1930 (London, 1931), 28. The BULNS was an autonomous society composed of LNU branches and other internationalist societies based in British universities and colleges and formed from the British Group of the International Universities’ League of Nations Federation, of which Zimmern was honorary president. See “British Group IULNF Secretary's Annual Report, April 1925–July 1926,” in British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), London: Records of the League of Nations Union (LNU) 7/4.

32 There were over 1,200 such branches by 1932.

33 LNU, Hints for Study Circles (London, n.d), 4. Study circles were popular with branches based in universities but flourished elsewhere, too. By 1920, for example, Hampstead branch had seven, Chelsea and Letchworth five apiece, and Tonbridge four. See LNU, Annual Report (London, 1920).

34 LNU, Our Immediate Duty (London, 1920), 6.

35 LNU, After Eight Years (London, 1926).

36 Cecil, General Council Minutes, 26 June 1934, BLPES: LNU/7/9, fol. 25.

37 These committees selected dates for the completion of the Ballot in the division and appointed ward captains to supervise the delivery and collection of forms, using names and addresses obtained from local directories or ward registers. Volunteers visited on average between thirty and forty houses, issuing one form per household and inviting each resident aged eighteen or above to indicate their response to the five questions before signing the form. Each form carried space for six signatures and room was provided for additional comments. Completed papers were returned to the divisional head office for counting and verification, a task overseen, in many cases, by local government officers, before final totals were sent on to London headquarters. Livingstone, The Peace Ballot; and NDC, Peace or War? Plan of a National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments (undated leaflet).

38 Livingstone, The Peace Ballot, 6–7.

39 NDC, What They Think about the Peace Ballot (undated leaflet).

40 M. Scott Johnson, “This Proves We All Want Peace,” Daily Mirror, 10 April 1935, 12; Walter Ashley, “Why Not a Peace Minister?” Daily Mirror, 27 June 1935, 10.

41 “The Peace Ballot,” The Listener, 13 March 1935, 428.

42 “Peace Ballot Is Succeeding,” Headway 16, no. 12 (December 1934): 224.Google Scholar

43 Livingstone, The Peace Ballot; Viscount Cecil, “The Last Lap,” The Ballot Worker, 9 April 1935, 1.

44 Manchester Guardian, 12 January 1935, 7.

45 Press clipping from John Bull dated 15 June 1935, 11, in Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK (CAC): Papers of Philip Noel-Baker (NBKR) 2/25.

46 Ernest Winterton, “In the Difficult Areas,” The Ballot Worker, 9 April 1935, 2.

47 News Chronicle, 5 December 1934, 13. “Organising the Vote: In the Country—East Norfolk,” The Ballot Worker, 12 March 1935, 3.

48 Ashley, “Why Not a Peace Minister?”

49 This provision complicated the task of calculating the Ballot poll as a percentage of all eligible voters. Following actuarial advice and in consultation with the three political parties, NDC officials decided to add 9 percent to the Parliamentary electorate (1934 register) in order to allow for these extra voters. They also deducted 10 percent to cover plural voters, those out of the country or unable to vote due to illness (Livingstone, The Peace Ballot, 54).

50 Ibid., 20–21.

51 Ceadel, “The First British Referendum.” Beaverbrook's Daily Express led the attack among the right-wing dailies, dubbing the Declaration the “Ballot of Blood.” See Daily Express, 12 November 1934, 1 and 12; and Beaverbrook's letter to the editor, 13 November 1934, 1.

52 Lord Cranborne to Cecil, 19 [?] July 1934, BL, Add. MSS 51087, fol. 7.

53 For full details, see Thompson, “The ‘Rainbow’ Controversy.”

54 “Dos and Don’ts,” The Ballot Worker, 12 February 1935, 3; NDC, Peace or War? To Every Helper in the National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments (undated leaflet). See also “And Now to Vote,” Headway 16, no. 11 (November 1934): 204.Google Scholar

55 Letter from Gilbert Murray, The Times, 28 November 1934, 10.

56 As Ceadel explains, the original Ilford Ballot had posed a question about Britain's duty under the terms of the Locarno Treaty to come to the aid of France or Germany if one were attacked by the other. Only 24.2 percent supported this provision, prompting the NDC to reframe the question of collective security in more abstract terms and to separate the issue of military force from the use of economic sanctions. The Conservative note took issue with this formulation, declaring that “to answer question (a) with a yes, and (b) with a no would be to adopt a policy of bluff while openly proclaiming it to be a bluff and no more” (“The First British Referendum,” 821).

57 John Simon, 8 November 1934, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 293, col. 1315.

58 Letter from Charles Mallet, The Times, 14 November 1934, 10.

59 The first was from the medieval historian G. G. Coulton, to Murray, 30 November 1934, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bodl.): Papers of Gilbert Murray, MSS. 221, fols. 44–45; the second was from a Yorkshire-based ballot worker, J. Foster Weatherhead, to Murray, 7 December 1934, Bodl.: Murray Papers, 221, fol. 72.

60 “Commonsense Is Enough,” Headway 16, no. 9 (September 1934): 164Google Scholar. “The Peace Ballot,” The Listener, 13 March 1935, 428 and 458.

61 Middlesex County Times, 9 March 1935, 13. See also Daily Mirror for 10 November 1934, 11.

62 Leicester Mercury, 26 February 1935, 16.

63 Bury Times, 15 December 1934, 19.

64 See, e.g., letter from Charles Waterhouse, MP, to Leicester Mercury, 9 February 1935, 15; and Canon Pollard's letter to Lancashire Daily Post, 24 November 1934, 5.

65 Lancashire Daily Post, 19 November 1934, 10.

66 Leicester Mercury, 27 February 1935, 10; The Ballot Worker, 11 July 1935, 8. The NDC decided in favor of “National Declaration” as the official title of the exercise on 15 May after objections to the term “referendum” had been raised. See “Meeting of the Conference of the National Declaration held 15th May,” in CAC: NBKR/2/22. The word, however, appears not infrequently in propaganda and the speeches of Ballot supporters after this date.

67 “Sir Norman Angell Explains: Why Have a Peace Ballot?” Kent Quarterly (Winter 1935): 10, 14 (a longer version of the piece appeared in the foreign affairs supplement to Time and Tide, 1 December 1934, 61–68).

68 Ceadel remarks: “It is possible to sympathize with the Tory position, since its criticism of the questions and accompanying literature had much truth in them.” Ceadel, “The First British Referendum,” 820. See also Blythe, The Age of Illusion, 251; Graves and Hodge, The Long Weekend, 320; Rock, William, Appeasement on Trial: British Foreign Policy and Its Critics, 1938–1939 (Hamden, 1966), 9Google Scholar; T. Taylor, Munich, 226; Reynolds, British Foreign Policy, 112; Northedge, F. S., The Troubled Giant: Britain among the Great Powers, 1916–1939 (London, 1966), 417Google Scholar; Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 541–42.

69 The TUC represented 3.3 million workers in September 1934 (David Butler and Gareth Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900–2000 [Basingstoke, 2000], 387); in 1937, the NCW had 17,000 individual members and 1,268 affiliated organizations, giving a total membership of around 2.5 million (Dame Maria Ogilvie Gordon, An Historical Sketch of the National Council of Women of Great Britain [1937]).

70 The total number of volunteers taking part was estimated at 500,000. As the LNU's individual membership at the end of 1934 stood at 396,184, at least 100,000 additional volunteers were supplied from among these organizations.

71 Manchester Guardian, 13 November 1934, 5.

72 Minutes of the WCG, Bury branch, 10 October 1934, Bury Archives, GCW/1/7.

73 For examples of these activities, see “News from Far and Near” and “Women on the Front Line,” The Ballot Worker, 23 May 1935, 4, 8.

74 See, e.g., League of Nations Society, Monthly Report, March 1918, 15; September 1918, 13; and “Pump More Oxygen into the League,” Headway 5, no. 3 (March 1923): 58.Google Scholar

75 Appendix to Executive Committee minutes, 21 December 1922, BLPES: LNU/2/5, fols. 24–25.

76 Beaumont, Caitriona, “Women and Citizenship: A Study of Non-feminist Women's Societies and the Women's Movement in England, 1928–1950” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 1996)Google Scholar; Thane, Pat, “What Difference Did the Vote Make?” in Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, ed. Vickery, Amanda (Stanford, CA, 2001), 253–88Google Scholar; Glick, Daphne, The National Council of Women of Great Britain: The First One Hundred Years, 1895–1994 (London, 1995).Google Scholar For a more general account of women's involvement in the interwar peace campaign, see Liddington, Jill, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London, 1989)Google Scholar; and Alberti, Johanna, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (Basingstoke, 1989)Google Scholar.

77 Letter from Robinson, Adeline, Home and Country 16, no. 1 (January 1934): 44Google Scholar. As corporate associates, institutes paid a subscription and received regular literature from the LNU.

78 Lancashire Daily Post, 21 November 1934, 5.

79 “Notes of a delegation received by the prime minister at the Foreign Office from Societies Co-operating in the National Declaration on the 23rd July, 1935,” The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) PREM 1/178, fol. 11. Baldwin took over from Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister in June 1935.

80 See the reports of the isolationist Daily Express, 5 November 1934, 1 and 17.

81 NDC, Religion and the Peace Ballot (undated leaflet).

82 Ibid.

83 Over 70 percent of the LNU's 3,624 “corporate members” in 1932 were Anglican or Nonconformist congregations. Corporate members paid £1 subscription per annum and undertook to enroll their members as individual subscribers of the LNU.

84 Bebbington, D. W., The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Robbins, Keith, “Free Churchmen and the Twenty Years’ Crisis,” in History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993), 149–60.Google Scholar

85 Conservative minister Samuel Hoare recalled the “semi-religious” character of LNU meetings, which “began and ended with prayers and hymns, and were throughout inspired by a spirit of emotional revivalism” (see Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, 113).

86 Rev. D. C. Davies's report for week 13–18 July 1925, National Library of Wales (NLW): Records of the Welsh National Council (WNC), B1/79.

87 The World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship was formed under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury in August 1914. A later organization, the World Council of Churches, based its headquarters in Geneva. Kent, John, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain, 1880–1950 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

88 Machin, G. I. T., Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Temple was a vocal supporter of both the League and the LNU. He preached a controversial sermon at the opening of the Disarmament Conference in 1932 castigating the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles, which was later printed in pamphlet form by the LNU. See “Members One of Another,” Church and World, no. 19 (n.d): 2. A. D. Lindsay was also a keen internationalist and supporter of the LNU. In 1939 he became chairman of the British National Committee of the International Peace Campaign, a position previously held by Cecil.

90 “Notes of a Delegation,” TNA: PRO PREM 1/178, fols. 9 and 10.

91 Blackpool Gazette, 1 December 1935, 24. Letter from Maxwell Garnett to H. A. L. Fisher at the Board of Education, 22 February 1922, TNA: PRO ED 12/216.

92 Cited in LNU, Teachers and World Peace, 2nd ed. (London: January 1929), 9–10.

93 Murray, Gilbert, “League Teaching for All Nations,” Headway 8, no. 9 (September 1926): 164.Google Scholar

94 Martin, Hubert, “The World-Wide Brotherhood of Scouts,” Headway 5, no. 2 (February 1923): 270.Google Scholar

95 Bailey, W. Lewis, “Scouts and the League,” Headway 8, no. 10 (October 1926): 192Google Scholar. The World Jamboree of 1929, held in Birkenhead, was attended by 30,000 Scouts from 71 countries.

96 Manchester Guardian, 8 November 1934, 14.

97 Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1934, 13.

98 Daily Herald, 13 November 1934, 10.

99 Pugh, Martin, “The Daily Mirror and the Revival of Labour, 1935–1945,” Twentieth Century British History 9, no. 3 (1998): 420–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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101 News Chronicle, 11 December 1934, 10.

102 Green, E. H. H., Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 For the Baldwinite discourse of citizenship, see Williamson, Philip, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; and Cannadine, David, “Emollience,” in In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar, and Class in Britain (London, 2000), 137–40Google Scholar. For Halifax see, e.g., “Democracy,” speech delivered in the Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge to a conference organized by the Association for Education in Citizenship, 8 July 1937, in Speeches on Foreign Policy by Viscount Halifax, ed. Craster, H. H. E. (London, 1940), 95.Google Scholar

104 She added, “and women do not forget the part you played in their enfranchisement.” “Notes of a Delegation,” TNA: PRO PREM 1/178, fol. 11.

105 Williamson, Philip, “Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–1940,” English Historical Review 115, no. 462 (June 2000): 607–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

106 “An Experiment in Democracy,” Time and Tide, 10 November 1934, 1405.

107 Daily Herald, 6 November 1934, 10.

108 Beers, Education or Manipulation? 144.

109 Of Liberal voters the chief publicity officer at Conservative Central Office remarked to Stanley Baldwin in August 1935, “no political issue is likely to influence them more than the question of peace and war and the future of the League of Nations.” Patrick Gower to Baldwin, 1 August 1935, Cambridge University Library (CUL): Papers of Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, vol. 47, fol. 104.

110 McKibbin, Ross, “Class and Conventional Wisdom: The Conservative Party and the ‘Public’ in Inter-war Britain,” in McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), 259–93.Google Scholar

111 A point argued in a different context by McCarthy in “Parties, Voluntary Societies and Democratic Politics,” 906–7.

112 Letter from H. W. Kemshall, Manchester Guardian, 27 November 1934, 20.

113 Letter from George Murphy, Daily Herald, 11 December 1934, 8. See also letter from “MP” of Brixham in News Chronicle, 10 November 1934, 4.

114 Penge and Beckenham Advertiser, 24 January 1935, 2.

115 Clipping from News Chronicle, dated 23 January 1935, CAC: NBKR/2/25.

116 Daily Express, 13 November 1934, 1.

117 Lawrence, “The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War,” 214.

118 “From the Front Line,” The Ballot Worker, 9 April 1935, i; “Bombshell in the Family,” The Ballot Worker, 9 May 1935, 6; “A London Suburb,” Manchester Guardian, 3 January 1935, 6; “Over the Teacups,” Nelson Leader, 7 December 1934, 10, and 14 December 1934, 10; “Ballad of the Peace Ballot,” Star, 22 March 1935, 4.

119 See Perry, Matt, The Jarrow Crusade: Protest and Legend (Sunderland, 2005)Google Scholar; Kushner, Tony and Valman, Nadia, eds., Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

120 News Chronicle, 11 March 1935, 10.

121 W. N. Ewer, “Britain Polls for Peace,” Daily Herald, 4 March 1935, 10.

122 Livingstone, The Peace Ballot, 54. The turnout figures cited for each division were calculated as a percentage of the eligible electorate, not as a proportion of householders known to have received forms.

123 Thompson attributes the Welsh success to the dedication of a “small army of regular members of the LNU who served as enthusiastic organizers.” See “The Welsh Campaign,” 395.

124 Lancashire Daily Post, 26 November 1934, 5, and 21 November 1934, 7. For more volunteer testimony, see “Ballad of the Peace Ballot”; letter from Evelyn Attock, News Chronicle, 21 November 1934, 4; “Organising the Vote: In the Country—East Norfolk,” The Ballot Worker, 12 March 1935, 3.

125 Eastbourne Gazette, 16 January 1935, 5.

126 News Chronicle, 17 December 1934, 7.

127 See Nelson Leader, 21 December 1934, 13. An early meeting of the Literature Sub-Committee at Ballot headquarters predicted that “of the total number of people filling up the Ballot Papers 98% of them would not ask questions of the workers.” Meeting of the Literature Sub-Committee, 23 July 1934, CAC, NBKR 2/22.

128 “The British People Have Spoken,” Headway 18, no. 1 (January 1936): 4.Google Scholar

129 Carr, “Public Opinion,” and The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Nicolson, See also the critical essay by Harold, “British Public Opinion and Foreign Policy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1937): 53–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

130 Amery, My Political Life, 159; Templewood, Nine Troubled Years, 128; Eden, Facing the Dictators, 237.

131 For the rise of opinion polling, see Beers, Laura, “Whose Opinion? Changing Attitudes towards Opinion Polling in British Politics, 1937–1964,” Twentieth Century British History 17, no. 2 (2006): 177–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

132 Madge, Charles and Harrisson, Tom, Britain by Mass Observation (London, 1939)Google Scholar.

133 Mass Observation explicitly rejected the Ballot technique as overly simplistic in its own study of popular attitudes toward peace shortly after the Second World War, although its own methods were criticized by some academic anthropologists. See Peace and the Public: A Study by Mass Observation (London, 1947), 1–2Google Scholar; and Moran, “Mass-Observation,” 832–34. For discussion of repeating the Ballot method, see Cecil to Philip Noel Baker, 6 January 1938, BL, Add. MSS 51108, fol. 166; and Murray to Noel Baker, 4 January 1938, Bodl.: Murray Papers 231, fol. 6.

134 Madge and Harrisson, Britain by Mass Observation, 41.

135 Ibid., 43–44.

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